Five Problems with the DHS/DOJ Report on Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States

On January 16, 2018, the Department of Justice and
Department of Homeland Security released a report on foreign terrorist entry
into the United States mandated by Executive Order 13780, which established the
travel ban.

The
report purports to bolster the defense of the travel ban and the Trump
administration’s focus on immigration, stating that about 73 percent of those
convicted in federal courts for international terrorism crimes between
September 11^th, 2001 and December 31^st, 2016 were foreign
born. In releasing the report, Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated,
“This report reveals an indisputable sobering reality—our immigration system
has undermined our national security and public safety.”

Yet there are five major problems with Sessions’ claim that
the report demonstrates that the immigration system has undermined American
security:

1. Even at face value, the
   report’s data reveals a substantial homegrown extremism challenge. By the
   report’s own numbers, a majority of the examined individuals were citizens and
   more than a quarter were natural-born citizens.
2. The report uses
   convictions for international terrorism related charges as its inclusion
   criteria. It thus presumably includes terrorists extradited to the United
   States or captured abroad who never stepped foot in the country and thus do not
   speak to the question of immigration policy. It also presumably includes cases
   related to FARC and other non-jihadist terrorist groups, which represent
   distinct threats from the threat that the travel ban is mainly aimed at. These
   are both problems that plagued
   previous efforts by Sessions and administration figures to defend the
   administration’s claims on the foreign-born status of most terrorism suspects.
3. The report assumes a
   link between being born outside the U.S. and entering as a terrorist. Yet most
   foreign born terrorism convicts radicalized in the United States and did not
   enter as terrorists.  A leaked Department
   of Homeland Security draft report
   stated “We assess that most foreign-born US-based violent extremists likely
   radicalized several years after their entry to the United States, limiting the
   ability of screening and vetting officials to prevent their entry because of
   national security concerns.” The report added that “Nearly half of the
   foreign-born, US-based violent extremists examined in our dataset were less
   than 16 years old when they entered the country and that the majority of
   foreign-born individuals resided in the United States for more than 10 years
   before their indictment or death.” 
4. The report only looks
   at federal convictions. Multiple terrorism suspects have been convicted in
   state or other non-federal courts. Such cases are far more likely to be
   citizens and include two major cases of natural-born citizens who committed
   deadly terrorist attacks: Carlos Bledsoe, who killed one person at a recruiting
   station in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2009 but was only charged in state court,
   and Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people in an attack on the Fort Hood military
   base, but was charged in military court. Similarly the press release for the
   report cites data on the large number of immigrants among federal criminal
   cases more generally, yet as Alex Nowrastreh, a CATO policy analyst, has noted,
   for such non-terrorism crimes, federal cases are only a small minority of the
   whole set of cases and over-represent the number of foreign-born individuals accused of such crimes.
5. Cases cited by the
   report do not prove the centrality of foreign born terrorists. For example,
   the report cites the case of Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan, who was born in
   Sudan, came to the United States, and conspired with another man, Joseph Hassan
   Farrokh, to join ISIS. The report doesn’t mention that Farrokh was a U.S.
   citizen born
   in Pennsylvania, suggesting that the terrorist activity was not dependent upon
   Elhassan’s immigration history but reflected a broader homegrown challenge.